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PART I: FRIENDS
~
LISS
“Ah, Ms. Larkin, it’s so nice to have you with us again,” said the flight attendant, handing me a warm towel. “Janelle” her nametag read.
It had been entirely too long since I had settled in here, 2A, my preferred seat on these transpacific flights. I used to travel to Asia six times a year. Now it had been – what? some two full years? Better not to study the question too closely.
I smiled despite myself, crinkling my eyes, all Janelle and her crewmates would be able to see for the next fourteen hours, at least until I slipped my eye mask into place where it would meet the purple polka dot mask that I wore overtop the snug N95. I wondered how I had ever felt like “a little hamster rocketing about inside an empty wheel, thunking and clunking from side to side as the wheel churns through the clouds,” as I had written a friend at the height of my pandemic malaise.
Walking down the jet bridge today felt like coming home, and I could not imagine tiring of travel again, not now and not in the future. I would not even mind if the flight were delayed, such was my ecstasy at being back on a plane. Instinctively, I checked my watch and modified the thought.Slightlydelayed.
I fiddled with my watch, toggling absently between the calendar, the weather, and the activity tracker. The cabin door was still open. I could yet change my mind, I thought half-seriously.
“Is Seoul your final destination today?” Janelle asked, bringing my attention into focus again.
“Not really.”
Janelle raised her eyebrows; the Asia-Pacific was just reopening and still not too many passengers were headed out on these flights. What few travelers were traveling abroad were giddy with their plans. The couple in the seats behind me had been chattering excitedly about the long-delayed tour of East Asia they were finally embarking on since they stowed their bags, and an older Korean couple in the adjoining center seats was traveling home after seeing their granddaughter here in the U.S. for the first time. She was already two years old.
Since I couldn’t believe my own plans, though, I couldn’t begin to explain them to a flight attendant. I pinched myself: not a dream.
Janelle took my jacket and continued up the aisle, while I settled in, intent on dulling my mind against the next twenty-four hours, the whole idea of this trip, everything in the past two decades that had led me to take my seat on this flight in the first place.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Douglas and I would like to personally welcome you aboard Delta Airlines Flight 159 with non-stop service from Detroit to Seoul…”
Even after the longest travel hiatus of my life, I could mouth the announcement along with the captain.
I settled snuggly into the nest I had made, all those glorious pillows and blankets, and dug out the fat, pink notebook that was never far from my reach and rested it against my knees. Something in the action reminded me of the evening I decided to send Nao Kao that first, fateful message. I must have sat in bed for hours that night, legal pad on my lap, a firm, straight line dividing the page into two columns. Pros on the left, cons on the right. The page was blank. After almost nineteen years, so was my mind.
Enough forgetting.
The images flooded my mind: a lighthouse, a camera, an overturned canoe. Books. Little white containers of fried rice and Pad Thai, the ones with the delicate metal handles. Crumbling towers against the unbroken blue sky. Picnic baskets and Shaggy and that smile, always that smile, broad and guileless, the gift of a contented man. All of this I remembered that night, as I had remembered it hours earlier, the afternoon sun arcing low, the shadows creeping across the hardwood floor as I took in the pictures spread before me.
I struggled to reconcile that the bright-faced girl gazing at me from the fading stack of photos was, in fact, me.
For the first time in almost two decades, I thought of him. I weighed my options: pitching the pebble into the pond, or laying it back softly on the shore, where the water might lap gently, but no ripples would spread.
Dear Nao Kao, I wrote.
It was as far as I got. Forget about a shot in the dark. If ever anything could be described as a bolt from the blue, this was it.
I checked again that my seatbelt was securely fastened, as the engines thrummed and the wheels spun. The big bird which would carry me to the other side of the earth roared down the runway and lifted into the air. I wondered again if I had been wrong to ever hit send – a butterfly’s wings, and all that. I inhaled deeply, focusing on the act of breathing; I was, I knew, as ready for this as I would ever be.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“I want togo to Laos.”
I blinked a few times.
“Sorry. I think you were frozen.”
She wasn’t. Neither the picture nor the audio could have been clearer, but the words coming through Zoom did not compute. It was the spring of 2020 and for the past several weeks we had been mired in pandemic, those terrifying early days when borders slammed shut without notice and we scrubbed our groceries before shelving them and lowered our eyes and crossed the street when we encountered another human on our morning runs.
My colleagues and I had been working tirelessly as day bled into night, Friday somehow immediately into Monday, to repatriate students and faculty from places a lot less distant than Southeast Asia, although some from there, too, and now this student had somehow finagled precious minutes on my calendar to tell me that she wanted to travel to Laos, to one of the least developed countries in Asia. I adjusted my screen and drew an unsteady breath. This was my seventh Zoom call of the day; maybe I was hearing things.
“Laos,” she repeated carefully. “I want to study in Laos. Not now,” she chuckled, the absurdity of the conversation perhaps catching up with her, “but when this is over. I know it won’t be easy, so I thought I could start planning now.”
